Painting has been an art form for millennia. For many years, there have been lessons on how to paint and pre-drawn outlines on paper or canvas, over which a person is instructed to paint. However, with the development lightweight transparent materials, such as plastic, and the advent of flat-screen video monitors, there has yet to be a method presented incorporating these technologies in the teaching and guiding of users to complete painted imagery.
Throughout the history of fine art, technology has always played a role. For example the invention of the camera forced painters to find new ways to create, and gave their art new purpose. Since cameras could more readily reproduce images better, cheaper, and with more accurate detail than painters, artists explored new ways to create their art. By doing so, paintings became more expressive, more colorful, and looser to the point of abstraction. It is a natural progression for technology (i.e.: photography/graphic design) to eventually aide in the production of new methods of painting. The world has gone through a technology revolution, and now a revolution of the arts, bringing us full circle to art through technology. In today's world, people are taking photos via cell phone at an amazing rate. At the same time, growing technologies in the fields of networking and graphic design software enable people and businesses to disseminate not just photos but graphical images (photos that have been filtered) to people throughout the world. This has set the stage for a movement, a revolution in the world of painting in which all can be empowered. By fusing technology with art to provide structure with the expressive world of abstract painting, a new art making process has been born.
Examples of related art are described below:
U.S. Pat. No. 3,846,826 pertains to a system and method that enables a person to paint or draw directly into color television. No special probe or stylus is required since a person can use brushes or pens, fingertips, rubber stamps, or any drawing or painting object whatsoever. At the same time, a person can place his free hand over a piano-like keyboard to synthesize images by manipulating or altering the images or forms as they are introduced. It is applicable to graphic productions of all sorts, computer input-output graphic processing systems, for visualizing mathematical transformations, or for use with scanning lasers or electron microscopes that etch or score.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,086 pertains to a method and apparatus for painting a digital picture using strokes of a digital brush. The painting strokes entered by a user is handled using a “lazy” processing approach, in which a region of the picture being painted is updated according to the entered strokes only when that region is to be displayed for viewing. To this end, the painting strokes are recorded as an ordered sequence of painting steps. The digital picture being painted is partitioned into a plurality of individual regions, and each region is assigned an age which indicates a painting step in the ordered sequence that is last applied to that region. When a region becomes visible, i.e., it is displayed for viewing, the age of the region is checked, and all of the painting steps in the ordered sequence that are after the step indicated by the age of the region are then applied to the region so that it becomes up-to-date. The age of that region is updated accordingly.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,977,982 pertains to a system and method for modification of the visual characteristics of digital 3D objects includes a shading buffer wherein parameters relating to the visual characteristics of a rendered 3D object are stored. When a texture applied to the 3D object is selected for modification, a pre-rendering step is performed and a shading buffer constructed. The shading buffer includes pre-computed components of the visual characteristic information for each rendered pixel of the displayed 3D object, these components are independent of the texture selected for modification. When the texture is modified, by indicating one or more pixels on the 3D object to which the texture is applied, re-rendering of those pixels is accomplished by evaluating a simple combination of the corresponding pre-computed components in the shading buffer and the modification effected to the selected texture to obtain new final values to render the pixels. By pre-computing and arranging the components in the shading buffer, the computational requirements for re-rendering the modified portions of the 3D object are reduced, allowing real time re-rendering in many circumstances.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,417 pertains to a method of simulating the creation of a mock artist's drawing or painting image on a monitor, from an electronically-stored image, comprising translating the electronically-stored image into instructions capable of creating the mock image; generating and displaying on the monitor an icon which simulates drawing or painting the mock image; and using the instructions to move the icon across the monitor, wherein the mock image is created gradually as the icon moves across the monitor, to simulate the process by which an artist may create the mock image. Also disclosed is a device for accomplishing the methods of this invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,870,550 pertains to a method in which a user identifies an area of a digital canvas. Color gradients are determined based on a corresponding area on a reference. Brush strokes are applied in the area of the digital canvas, the brush strokes having trajectories based on the color gradients.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,919,893 pertains to an image editing apparatus that includes a mouse and a display function as a drawing interface, such as a digital canvas, a palette, and a pen or a brush. A stroke input by a user by dragging the mouse is regarded as a hand-drawn operation with the pen or the brush. In the digital canvas, painting is performed by using inks having various attributes and activities such as texture and animation, based on the stroke input by the user.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,830,212 pertains to a method and system for recording hand-painted, hand-drawn and handwritten information defined by a hand and/or fingers movement. The system corresponding to the invented method comprises: a computing device with a display, an input device comprising: an end-point coupled to a force sensor, additional motion sensors, IC circuit for digitizing the information from sensors and processing the data related to the force and motion vectors components; hardware and software for providing a digital description of how the device has been pressed to the surface and how the device has been moved. Besides above mentioned applications the method and system can also be used for precise cursor navigation on the display, computer gaming and as a universal remote control for electronic equipment and appliances or as a security device with multi-level authentication. With an addition of several components the input device can be used as a smart cell-phone.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,896,579 pertains to a graphics application for simulating natural media drawing and painting may model a tablet stylus as if it were a virtual projector, and as if a 2D brush tip image were projected on a virtual canvas. The application may compute a texture projection based on the values of configurable parameters of the application and/or 6DOF data collected from the tablet stylus and/or the tablet. This texture projection (i.e., the mark resulting from deformation of the 2D brush tip image due to the stylus pose) may be used as a 2D stamp to create a mark on the virtual canvas in response to contact between the stylus and tablet. This may create a more natural mapping between tablet stylus poses and the resulting marks for artists accustomed to the behavior of pencils, felt tip pens, airbrushes, or another natural media, compared to those employed in previous digital painting applications.
U.S. Patent Application No. 2002/0118209 pertains to a method for applying “painting” effects to a digitized image. A first method includes the step of creating a bitmap from an inputted digitized image wherein color values are assigned to each pixel in the image. The method then compares the color values of each pixel in the bitmap and determines “pixel-commonality” which defines “working regions”. The method then applies a predetermined texture to each working region from a database of textures. The particular texture selected is dependent on the particular artist or painting style chosen by the user. After the method displays the altered image (the image having the applied textures), the user may decide whether to save the altered image, or to have the method “re-paint” the original image. The method can “re-paint”the image by automatically changing predetermined parameters or default settings used to define working regions and/or the type and intensity of the applied textures.
It is noted that none of the art described above addresses all of the issues addressed by the embodiments of the present invention.